Bill Barbot and his family moved from Washington, D.C. to Williston, Vermont during the pandemic in search of a slower life.
Barbot talks with Vermont Public producer Erica Heilman about what he’s since learned about class perceptions and assumptions in the state in this latest installment of "What Class are You?"
This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Bill Barbot: My experience of Vermont, and my experience of class and class disparity and class diversity in Vermont, was all filtered through the lens of the pandemic at first. Which meant that it came in fits and starts. Once that began to thaw, and once we began to go back out into the world, we then were confronted with the fact that we lived in Williston. And we live in Chittenden County, which I learned from a casual barb from a friend is like, "Oh, I hear that's near Vermont." So I learned that, which I did not know when we moved up here.
I did not know that when I moved to Williston, and I've told my wife this, that we were moving to the Bethesda of Vermont. And so it wasn't until we began to really start to circulate in the community when we would say, "Oh, we live up in Williston."
Oh.
And it wasn't disparaging. It was a categorization. It enabled certain folks that I would encounter from other parts of the state to go, "Oh," as in, "Oh, I know what you're about."
We didn't intend it that way. We didn't intend to move to Chittenden County so that we could be the house on the hill. That wasn't the plan. The plan was not to be somehow separating ourselves from the rest of reality around here. But it wasn't until we got here that we began to realize, "Oh, there are different perceptions of who we are based upon our location of our home," that we walked right into without even knowing it.
I absolutely love living in Williston. There is a very strong sense of community here. We're very actively involved in the kids' school, and so we encounter all of the folks who are involved in their kids' school, which includes everybody from all walks of life around here. And anyone who's listening to this who doesn't know Williston, or doesn't live in Williston but has a perception of Williston as being somehow socioeconomically upper stratum, doesn't get it. There's a lot of diversity just within the town of Williston, and within Chittenden County at large, that gives a whole different perspective on what it means to be a part of a community.
What we did not find in D.C. was that feeling of connection, of shared purpose. But here it came really easily, and I ascribe a lot of that to the "Vermontishness" of Vermonters. They're just kind of like, "Well, this thing needs to get done, so let's just pull together and do it." It's a very matter-of-fact civic activism that I find up here. It's just like, "Well, we just got to figure out how to plow the road, so we'll throw some money together and we'll have somebody to plow the road. If we want our school to be better, we have to do something about it. We can't just rail at the PTA meeting or shout at the school board and let them fix it. We need to get involved."
I came for the feeling of a slower life. I came for a feeling of being closer to nature, of raising my kids in a place that wasn't so breakneck, of raising my kids that wasn't spending an hour and a half a day in traffic. A lot of the real superficial, simple things were what was my immediate reaction to, "I have to get out of D.C." But what I found when I got up here was, "Oh, there's all of this warmth of community," and I find that pretty much everywhere I go in the state.
Erica Heilman: What do you think that you have been sensitive to or sensitized to about socioeconomic diversity since living here?
Bill Barbot: In D.C., it was very easy to cloister yourself from what you didn't want to see. It was easy to take the route to work that just kept you on the storied boulevards of Washington. It was easy to go to a club, or to go to whatever social events where you just felt like you were insulated from the ugly reality of diversity and the rich pageant that a city like D.C. can afford. Here, you can't do that. Even in Williston, despite its perception maybe from the outside of Williston of being rather wealthy, it does not take but a two minute drive to encounter somebody who is living in very significant poverty.
Erica Heilman: What is the value for you and also maybe for your neighbor who is living in challenging circumstances? How is it mutually beneficial? Or is it?
Bill Barbot: It's going to sound like class tourism when I say this, but I feel that there is value for myself, my own humanity and for the value of my children — and their burgeoning humanity — to be as exposed and interacting with as many different kinds of human beings as possible. I want them to work in a world where they can really understand that it takes all of us filling various roles and playing different parts to make it interesting, and to make it work and to make it function. So there is value for me as a parent to raise my kids in that kind of environment, and there's a value for me as an individual to recognize I have a lot more in common with someone who identifies as a parent than I do with someone who identifies as wealthy.
We're worried about the same kind of stuff. How do we feed our kids a healthy meal? How do we make sure that they're educated? How do we make sure they have friends? How do we make sure they don't get their hearts broken? All the kinds of things that parents worry about, that's a connective tissue that holds a community together. That gives me a commonality in a common language that I can speak with anybody who is also a parent, regardless of whether we're talking about, "What kind of car should I buy?" Those levels of conversation are less important than fundamental values of, "How do I raise my kid to be a decent human being?"
